The health care industry is a vast and complex enterprise in which significant advancements are being made at all levels. For example, medical knowledge and the quality of care provided to patients has improved, in part, through increased specialization of doctors. While such specialization has provided advantages to patients, it may also create drawbacks in the diagnosis and treatment of injuries. For example, a patient may need to see numerous doctors in order to address the complications that may result from a single injury or illness. This effect may be compounded where the patient suffers from numerous injuries or severe or complex illnesses.
In addition, medical treatment and pharmaceutical prescription options have improved such that there are numerous possible courses of treatment for any diagnosis or injury. As an example, a range of pain relievers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and other medications can be prescribed in response to a particular injury.
Also, based on external factors such as pricing discrepancies, insurance coverage limits for in-network versus out-of-network providers and/or the existence of multiple insurance programs, a patient may visit numerous different pharmacies to fill prescriptions that may have been issued by several different doctors.
As a result of the increased specialization of doctors, the availability of a wider scope of appropriate medications, and the greater administrative burdens associated with filling prescriptions at numerous pharmacies, medical billing records have consequently become more detailed and complex.
In some cases, such greater complexity has resulted in the potential for numerous problems in the provision of health care. In particular, doctors who make diagnostic and treatment decisions on behalf of a patient may not always have access to or knowledge of the patient's complete medical history. Additionally, even if the doctors do have access to the patient's entire medical history as of a particular time, information associated with a doctor's visit may be delayed before it is made accessible from a centralized repository, which may create opportunities for redundant or multiple treatments. As a result of such delays, doctors may improperly diagnose or treat a patient by over-treating a condition and/or issuing conflicting treatments.
Improper treatment also increases the cost of insurance claim payouts. For example, over-treatment or mistreatment directly increases the cost of medications for a given patient and may also result in side effects that can be as difficult and expensive to treat as the initial injury or ailment. In the aggregate, improper treatment may increase costs industry wide.
Improper treatment is a particular concern when a patient develops a dependency on or an addiction to a medication. Dependency and addiction can form if the patient is, for example, prescribed too large an amount of a medication before the patient's body has had time to develop a tolerance to the treatment. In addition, once a patient becomes dependent upon or addicted to a medication, the patient's primary treatment (i.e., for the initial injury or ailment for which the medication was first prescribed) must be adjusted to combat the dependency or addiction.
Although dependency and addiction are a concern for many categories of medications, the risks of dependency and addition are particularly pronounced for patients who are prescribed narcotics, i.e., drugs having morphine-like properties. Narcotics are highly addictive and patients who take narcotics run a high risk of becoming dependent on those medications. Once a dependency or an addiction to a particular drug forms, patients are often switched to a different drug, i.e., an opioid such as methadone, in order to maintain the requisite pain relieving effect but with a more manageable risk of dependency. However, the use of methadone has its own risks of dependency. For example, in 2004, methadone abuse contributed to the death of approximately 4,000 individuals in the United States alone, an increase of approximately 400% since 1999.
In addition to the immediate risk to the health of patients, the costs of providing health care to patients who become addicted to or otherwise abuse narcotics are, on average, approximately eight times greater than the costs of providing health care to non-abusers. Ideally, the preemptive detection of dependency or addiction would provide the patient with treatment options that could mitigate or combat the dependency or addiction early on, when treatment would be most effective. However, preemptive detection of the dependency or addiction may be difficult, depending on the nature of the patient's injury, the number of doctors who provide treatment to the patient, or the complexity of the patient's drug regimen. In addition, lack of access to the patient's full medical history, as discussed above, further compounds the problem of early detection.
Another problem accentuated by the increased size and complexity of the health care industry is fraud, such as insurance billing abuse, illegitimate billing practices, and drug diversion, e.g., the use of prescription drugs for recreational purposes. Drug diversion alone cost the United States insurance industry an estimated $72.5 billion in 2008 and is particularly significant because it poses a public health and safety risk as medications are made available through the black market. In these unregulated channels, drug abuse proliferates.